Spirit Entertainment has revealed that The Criterion Collection UK releases for August 2025 will be Paul Schrader’s visually stunning, collagelike portrait of the acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning Shoeshine, and A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong – Two Films by Edward Yang. Full details below.

MISHIMA: A LIFE IN FOUR CHAPTERS (USA/Japan 1985)

4K UHD + Blu-ray | 4 August 2025

Paul Schrader’s visually stunning, collagelike portrait of the acclaimed Japanese author and playwright Yukio Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) investigates the inner turmoil and contradictions of a man who attempted the impossible task of finding harmony among self, art, and society. Taking place on the last day of Mishima’s life, when he famously committed public seppuku, the film is punctuated by extended flashbacks to the writer’s past as well as gloriously stylized evocations of his fictional works. With its rich cinematography by John Bailey, exquisite sets and costumes by Eiko Ishioka, and unforgettable, highly influential score by Philip Glass, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a tribute to its subject and a bold, investigative work of art in its own right.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD & BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

• 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, supervised and approved by director Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack 
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features 
• Two alternate English narrations, including one by actor Roy Scheider 
• Audio commentary featuring Schrader and producer Alan Poul 
• Program on the making of the film featuring Bailey, producers Tom Luddy and Mata Yamamoto, composer Philip Glass, and production designer Eiko Ishioka 
• Program on Yukio Mishima featuring his biographer John Nathan and friend Donald Richie 
• Audio interview with co-screenwriter Chieko Schrader 
• Interview excerpt from 1966 featuring Mishima talking about writing 
• The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, a 1985 documentary about the author 
• Trailer 
• PLUS: An essay by critic Kevin Jackson, a piece on the film’s censorship in Japan, and photographs of Ishioka’s sets

SHOESHINE (SCIUSCIÀ, 1946)

4K UHD + Blu-ray | 18 August 2025

An international breakthrough for neorealism, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award–winning film is an indelible fable of innocence lost amid the hardscrabble reality of 1940s Italy. On the streets of Rome, two boys – best friends Giuseppe (Rinaldo Smordoni) and Pasquale (Franco Interlenghi) – set out to raise the money to buy a horse by shining shoes. When they are inadvertently caught up in a robbery and sent to a brutal juvenile detention centre, their loyalty to each other is severely tested. A devastating portrait of economic struggle made all the more haunting by its child’s-eye perspective, Shoeshine stands as one of the defining achievements of postwar Italian filmmaking.

4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

• New 4K digital restoration, undertaken by The Film Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
• Sciuscià 70 (2016), a documentary by Mimmo Verdesca, made to mark the film’s seventieth anniversary
• New program on Shoeshine and children in Italian neorealism featuring film scholars Paola Bonifazio and Catherine O’Rawe
• Radio broadcast from 1946 featuring director Vittorio De Sica
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar David Forgacs and “Shoeshine, Joe?,” a 1945 photo-documentary by De Sica

A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION AND MAHJONG – TWO FILMS BY EDWARD YANG

Blu-ray | 25 August 2025

In this pair of sharp, sprawling satires, one of Taiwan’s most celebrated filmmakers, Edward Yang, captures the anything-can-happen mood of Taipei at the end of the twentieth century. Made in between his epic dramas A Brighter Summer Day and Yi Yi, A Confucian Confusio and Mahjong find Yang applying a lighter but no less masterly touch to his explorations of human relationships in an increasingly globalized, hypercapitalistic world. These intricately constructed ensemble comedies – one set in a cutthroat corporate milieu, the other in a shady criminal underworld – reveal the absurdity and cynicism at the heart of modern urban life.

A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (DU LI SHI DAI – Taiwan, 1995)
Edward Yang’s first foray into comedy may have been a surprising stylistic departure, but in its richly novelistic vision of urban discontent, it is quintessential Yang. This relationship roundelay centres on a coterie of young Taipei professionals whose paths converge at an entertainment company where the boundaries between art and commerce, love and business, have become hopelessly blurred. Evoking the chaos of a city infiltrated by Western chains, logos, and attitudes, A Confucian Confusion is an incisive reflection on the role of traditional values in a materialistic, amoral society.

MAHJONG (Taiwan, 1996)
Edward Yang’s follow-up to A Confucian Confusion is another dizzying comedy set in a globalized Taipei, but with a darker, more caustic edge. Amid a rapidly changing cityscape, the lives of a disparate group of swindlers, hustlers, gangsters, and expats collide, with a naive French teenager (Virginie Ledoyen) and a sensitive young local (Lawrence Ko) who tries to protect her caught dangerously in the middle. By turns brutal, shocking, tender, and bitingly funny, Mahjong is a dazzling vision of a multicultural Taipei where nearly every relationship has a price and newfound prosperity comes at the expense of the human soul.

TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

• New 4K digital restorations, with 5.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtracks
• Excerpts of director Edward Yang speaking after a 1994 screening of A Confucian Confusion
• New interview with editor Chen Po-wen
• New conversation between Chinese-cultural-studies scholar Michael Berry and film critic Justin Chang
• Performance of Yang’s 1992 play Likely Consequence
• PLUS: An essay by film programmer and critic Dennis Lim and a 1994 director’s note on A Confucian Confusion